When is Pride inauthentic? | This Week in Business
Brendan Sinclair
Managing Editor
Friday 3rd June 2022
Happy Pride Month, everyone!
It's that time of year for all of us to celebrate the wonderful diversity of humanity and affirm that everyone should be free to be their true selves openly and safely in all aspects of society!
Well, maybe not quite all of us.
Electronic Arts this week gave staff a few guidelines on exactly how and under what circumstances they can celebrate Pride in public.
Some of the guidelines are good, like the suggestion to do something more substantial than dusting off the ol' rainbow version of the brand Twitter avatar, even if it's just pointing players to more resources about Pride. In-game events are great, they say, but telling dev teams this just days before the start of Pride doesn't exactly give them time to put those together.
Others guidelines are much less good, such as the edict that any Pride statements "may not be political in nature." Game publishers have always had a very poor grasp of politics, but considering the US' current wave of anti-trans legislation and passage of the "Don't Say Gay" bill in Florida prohibiting early school educators from even acknowledging the existence of non-straight sexual orientation or non-cis gender identity, any utterance of Pride is inherently political.
But what gets me most is the FAQ saying that EA employees and brand social channels have permission to tweet and retweet social posts in support of LGBTQIA+ and trans rights, "providing it is authentic to your community and the brand."
Let's consider that for a second.
Certainly you would expect some EA brands to be more quick to post and embrace about LGBTQIA+ rights than others.
The Sims team, for example, earlier this year showed it would rather not release
Read more on gamesindustry.biz
